Of all the commentaries on the Chas Freeman affair, David Rothkopf on Foreign Policy offers one of the more insightful takes, not least because of his devastating assault on “Israel Lobby” co-author Stephen Walt’s tired, whiny conspiracy theories.
Writes Rothkopf:
Walt, needless to say, did a little victory dance as well, offering commentary that was supposedly focused on the injustice done to Freeman but which really was a smug “I told you so” laden with a list of co-conspirators with names so Jewish that I could hardly read it without cringing. He added his obligatory “some of my best friends are Jewish” sentence listing some Jewish supporters of Freeman and threw in his tired old “I am the one who is a real friend of Israel” trope saying, as he always does, “I really have the best interests of that country at heart and if they would only listen to me they would be much better off.”
Freeman, I can forgive. He had every reason to be angry. Walt, not now, not ever, because whatever the pale intellectual merits of his hackneyed argument may be, he and Mearsheimer know full well that their prominence on this issue has come not because they have had a single new insight but rather because they were willing and one can only believe inclined to play to a crowd whose “views” were fueled by prejudice and worse. They may not be anti-Semites themselves but they made a cynical decision to cash in on anti-Semitism by offering to dress up old hatreds in the dowdy Brooks Brothers suits of the Kennedy School and the University of Chicago. They did what the most desperate members of academia do, they signed up to be rent-a-validators, akin to expert witnesses who support the defense of felons with specious theories served up on fancy diplomas. They would argue that they were daring to speak truth to power. In reality they were giving one crowd in particular precisely what it wanted to hear.
Read it all.
Rothkopf, incidentally, offers some harsh criticisms of pro-Israel advocacy groups as well. And that contributes to what should be an energetic, informed debate about US policy in the Middle East - a debate that Walt, Mearsheimer, Freeman and all the other “Israel Lobby” bashers refuse to engage in, because they would rather present themselves as free speech martyrs than defend their views.
Interesting who published the text of Freeman.
It was published by the Website Eiserne Krone of the Austrian fascist Robert Schwarzbauer, who converted to Shiite Islam and on the Website of the Swedish-Russian antisemite Adam Ermash, former Jöran Jermas, who is publishing under the pen name Israel Shamir.
The German antisemitic extreme left daily Junge Welt also published Freeman.
The propaganda about the Jewish Lobby ruling America is not new.
Antisemitic Propaganda played an important role in Nazi anti-American propaganda in 1941. Roosevelt’s “senseless” path of intervention was explicable only by reference to “a very powerful clique of political and financial power holders” who wanted to “save Jewish Anglo-Saxon democracy.”
Theodor Seibert, Das amerikanische Rätsel: Die Kriegspolitik in der Ära Roosevelt (The American Riddle: The War Policy of the USA in the Roosevelt Era) Berlin, 1941 p. 63
The same author attributed Churchill’s opposition to Nazi Germany to his “intimate personal” links to Rothschild in London. Churchill had “used his Jewish connections across the Atlantic to threaten the English people with Washington’s anger” if they refused to support war against Germany. He wrote that it was “no longer necessary to offer proof” that Roosevelt’s policies were not in the American interest but instead supported “purely Jewish interests.”